18 ms·

Java for Everything

• mythz 12y ago
  What he said, but C#. C#'s one of the most versatile languages which can target most of the popular platforms, e.g: iOS/Android (Xamarin), WindowsPhone, Windows, Linux, OSX, Silverlight, PS4, XBox (announced), Unity3D and NaCL. C#/.NET's biggest weakness of sub-optimal cross-platform support should also be resolved in the near future now that .NET's compiler, core runtime and class libraries are OSS and with Microsoft announcing support and plans to release official distributions for Linux and OSX - so .NET will finally have multi-platform support of a single code-base resolving earlier issues or running .NET on OSX/Linux due to different impls.
  • georgemcbay 12y ago
    My version would be "what he said, but choose any well-supported statically typed language, particularly one with decent type inference, since that gets you a lot of the convenience of dynamic typing without all of the very many runtime-error downsides".
  • drblast 12y ago
    C# has replaced scripting languages for me. It might be faster to write a python program to do something simple, but the amount of time saved on such small things is minimal. As soon as a project gets large, it outgrows the scripting language anyway.
• bonobo3000 12y ago
  This is exactly how I feel about Scala now. I really wanted to like Java because of the ecosystem and the JVM, but there ARE a few warts that you will face everywhere - verbosity is one, all the Spring stuff using annotations to wire up dependency injection and AOP and whatnot is another. Scala has the whole JVM ecosystem, static typing and forget about DI/AOP/OOP patterns. Feels like best of both worlds for me.
  • justinsb 12y ago
    I find Java much more pleasant without Spring; I much prefer Jetty+Jersey+Guava+Guice. It sounds like that's pretty similar to how you're using Scala.
    • mmastrac 12y ago
      Ditto. Spring feels like "the worst of Java", while the exact combo you list above is some of the best and the set I reach for. Jetty is showing its age a bit right now, but it's so much nicer than dealing with Tomcat.
    • frowaway001 12y ago
      I think the difference is that stuff is less hastily cobbled together. People use additional libraries because they add value, not because they paper over ugliness and holes of existing libraries. Scala feels "designed", while Java feels "evolved".
      • pjmlp 12y ago
        Yet I have 99% probabilities that my next JVM gig will be Java than Scala, as very few customers ask for Scala skills on their Request For Proposals.
        • frowaway001 12y ago
          How is this related to the topic?
          • pjmlp 12y ago
            That even though Scala is better designed than Java, without Java's cruft earned through evolution, most companies will keep on searching for Java developer skills.
            • frowaway001 12y ago
• Mithaldu 12y ago
  He learned something that most good Perl programmers learn fairly quickly: The interpreter/compiler is just the VM; the real language is the combination of all libraries available for it.
  • andor 12y ago
    There's no shortage of good libraries for Python. He just chose to not learn about them.
    • pjmlp 12y ago
      And all the fast ones aren't implemented in Python....
      • lmm 12y ago
        So what? For most problems there are fast, well-designed libraries available with idiomatic python interfaces; why would you care about the implementation details?
        • BuckRogers 12y ago
          Note, this is coming from the same guy who programs in x, which was also implemented in C(++). Like the JVM, CLR ad nauseum. :)
          • pjmlp 12y ago
            Do you know that there are JVM and CLR meta-circular implementations, right? And that the reference implementations get less C++ code with each release.
        • pjmlp 12y ago
          Because the whole point of the OP is being able to use the same language for the whole stack.
• einrealist 12y ago
  > I’m even taking this to an extreme and using Java shell scripts. Having a strong Java background, it is a pleasure to write Groovy for shell scripts. I like the blog post. Whenever I looked into other languages/platforms, I found the "tradeoffs" of Java (as pointed out by the other languages/platforms) to be less important for me. Java/the JVM may be evolving slowly. But it evolves and does it in a reasonable way (JCP, frameworks).
  • minthd 12y ago
    Why not just use Groovy for everything instead of java ?
    • sgt 12y ago
      Speaking of - how is Groovy doing these days? I looked at the Groovy webpage and I saw ads splattered here and there - never a good sign, I also see that the mailing lists are pretty quiet. Is Groovy dying?
      • einrealist 12y ago
        Whether Groovy is dying depends on how other languages do (like Javascript or JRuby). Groovy has found its niches and will not die soon. For instance, Gradle is built around it or Jetbrains is using it building IDEs like IntelliJ. The ads are probably helping to finance some of the codehaus infrastructure.
        • sgt 12y ago
          A new niche might be: Groovy on Android http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/06/groovy-android http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/06/groovy-android
      • frowaway001 12y ago
        I'd say not too good. Of course there are those two projects everyone mentions, Grails and Gradle, but I would say it's more correct to describe them as the only two niches where Groovy is actually used a bit, it's not like Gradle and Grails are just "flagship products" of a greater ecosystem. For both, there are already better replacemens available, so I don't think they will grow much in the future.
• jrochkind1 12y ago
  I am more convinced by the part "write everything in one language", and less convinced that Java is a great choice for that language. On the other hand, if you're going to write everything in one language, you do need a language that is capable of doing nearly everything, and doing it well. And I see how Java is a reasonable choice. But yeah, I think "pick the right language for the job" (and the corresponding "when all you have is a hammer...") under-estimates the extent that the right language for the job is the one you know best, because you'll be able be most effective in it.
• prohor 12y ago
  I would just add one more thing - I doubt there is another language where you write native apps for Android, iOS and Web sharing 70% of the code: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/11/how-google-inbox-shares-70-of-its-code-across-android-ios-and-the-web/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/11/how-go...
  • grimlck 12y ago
    C++ (Using something like emscripten for the web) Although, i'd pick java over C++ unless i'm doing some very performance critical
    • pjmlp 12y ago
      While true, it is a pain on Android, given how the Android team treats the C and C++ developers. The official set of APIs is quite limited and JNI is required for any app that isn't a game. Even C++ libraries that are wrapped in Java classes, like SKIA, are only accessible via JNI.
  • grokys 12y ago
    C#, with Xamarin.
  • untitaker_ 12y ago
    JS?
  • desdiv 12y ago
    From the JVM side, we have: Scala, Clojure, Groovy, Kotlin, etc thanks to RoboVM. From the CLR side, we have C# and F# thanks to Xamarin. Even the worst language among the six I have listed is still far better than the verbosity of Java.
  • zwetan 12y ago
    AS3 - with AIR for publishing on mobile - with SWF to publish on the web (for desktop browsers) and I would argue with the added bonus that you can share the UI without an horrible result
  • 12y ago
• CSDude 12y ago
  I cannot keep my sanity when I use dynamic languages in fairly big projects. I just cannot organize my code and all the functionality good. So, I looked at the options at Java and most of them looked either very complicated(Spring) or insufficient. I am developing a very simple framework, insipred from Sparkjava and Play Framework: https://github.com/mustafaakin/WebOM https://github.com/mustafaakin/WebOM It basically maps either HTTP requests or Websocket connections to Java objects with typed parameters.
  • exabrial 12y ago
    Try out CDI!
  • mercurial 12y ago
    I'm not sure what you're trying to do. If you're talking about dependency injection: 1) be aware that you're ditching some safety by relying on it 2) look at Guava
    • CSDude 12y ago
      I just map a request like /users/:groupId?orderBy=name to A java object like "int groupId", and "String name" and it puts them automatically by converting, and if you wish you add some checks, notnull, range etc. and It replies bad request to client. Therefore, I do not do this conversion and checking each time.
  • bluedevil2k 12y ago
    I'm starting to put together my own Java web framework to make things easier to get started quickly and borrowing ( heavily) from other language frameworks. https://github.com/bluedevil2k/Jiffy https://github.com/bluedevil2k/Jiffy
    • mike_hearn 12y ago
      Try checking out Ninja Framework. It's pretty decent.
• harvestmoon 12y ago
  Java doesn't seem too popular here but used right it can work pretty well, imo. For instance, I use Java for the backend of a name generator web app. It's astonishingly fast and displays results almost instantaneously despite running a good amount of backend calculations. This speed became an issue because you'd push the go button and the names would update - but it seemed like nothing happened. So I ended up adding an artificial delay twice (the first time it wasn't enough of a delay). On the other hand, its structure and methods can at times be frustratingly complex.
• mangecoeur 12y ago
  You have to admit that for coders, the joy of writing helps a lot for job satisfaction. I write both Java and Python (for very different applications) and I just always feel like Java makes it hard to write anything elegant almost on purpose. The proliferation of huge frameworks and FactoryFactories clearly doesn't help. I think you can underestimate the value in actually enjoying writing - I'm just more motivated every day I can write elegant python code. Conversely every day I spend fighting Java for an elegant solution and winding up inevitably with something a bit half-arsed because of some limitation in the language I just feel grumpy.
  • Terr_ 12y ago
    The problem is that one guys "Joy Of Writing" rapidly becomes the next guy's "Torture Of Reading", and with enough of a time-interval those two can be the same person.
    • mangecoeur 12y ago
      I feel Python is good in this regard compared to other interpreted languages. There's a lot of emphasis on "Pythonic" style which you tend to pick up as you learn, so people are discouraged from excess magic (Explicit is better than implicit) and the syntax at the very least lends itself to sane formatting (especially with PEP8). Personally I've rarely had any true WTF moments reading either my own code or code from (reputable) OSS projects.
  • pimlottc 12y ago
    I'm of two minds on this. Certainly it's important people find enjoyment in the day-to-day reality of their job. Unhappy people don't write good code in any language. But I honestly do thing people can have too much fun writing code. We've all fallen in love with something we've written even though it might not have been the simplest or most understandable or idiomatically sound. Writing Python is fun. But that joy can cloud your judgement, and if we are to consider ourselves professional, we have to look beyond just that and make decisions based on our employers best interest. Sometimes that might be Python, but in my experience, quite often that's boring old Java.
  • 12y ago
• one-more-minute 12y ago
  The problem with verbosity and repetition is not that it takes longer to type the code, at all. The problem is that it creates dependencies which you have to manage by hand. Changing `Foo a = new Foo()` to `Bar a = new Bar()` doesn't seem that bad... except when you have to propagate that change through the code base. Half of Java's tooling is dedicated to solving a problem that doesn't exist in good duck-typed languages or those with type inference. Verbosity is also a warning sign for lack of expressive power. If you have a pattern like `if (cmd == "run") run();` in multiple places in your codebase, you want to make it so that changing one changes them all. Java won't let you factor this out easily, but worse, it won't catch you when you make a mistake (better languages will either do first-class functions or pattern matching and exhaustiveness checks). Note that this has nothing to do with static vs. dynamic; verbosity is a problem that can be solved in many ways, but it is a problem. The author also spends a lot of time equating statically typed with fast; well, there are plenty of very fast dynamic languages. There certainly are reasons to like Java, but these aren't them.
  • rzwitserloot 12y ago
    DISCLAIMER: I write mostly java, at home and at work. Refactoring goes a lot further than just renaming types. A refactor script _WILL_ rename both sides of 'Foo x = new Foo();' to 'Bar x = new Bar();', so given the right utilities (and if you use java for everything, it's _MUCH_ easier to become an expert at the tools!) this is not any more effort at all. However, there are refactors for things that are much more difficult in a duck typed language. For example, if I have a bunch of methods named 'execute()' in my code, and I decide that this is a sad state of affairs and ripe for a refactor, I can refactor one of them to a different name and the tools will 'get it right', renaming the right calls (calls into this type) and not renaming the wrong ones (calls to another type's execute() method which has no relation to this type's execute() call). In python, you just can't do that. You'd have to rename all of them, defeating the point. Similar concerns crop up for 'find callers', or 'add argument to method'. There are also refactor scripts that are equally possible in both python and java, but which nevertheless require either a lot of manual editing, or an intelligent tool that can automate it, such as 'extract method' (taking the selected code and turning it into a (helper) method, figuring out which variable(s) would have to be passed along to make it all work as needed. The point is: Duck typing does not obviate the need for refactors. It does make certain refactors impossible to 'safely' automate ('safely' in the sense of ensuring that, post-refactor, the code does the same thing as it did pre-refactor). As far as 'dynamic == slow, static == fast' being a bit of an oversimplification, yup, that's true. Java _IS_ a heck of a lot faster than python, but that's mostly an implementation detail; you could make a pretty quick python. dynamic definitely does not help, but it can be worked around. Javascript JIT engines are seeing a lot of serious improvements right now, and a large part of it is guesstimating type info. They're getting pretty fast. In the spirit of the article, though, static typing isn't just a boon for speed reasons (based on the practical upshot that java IS fast, and most dynamic solutions simply aren't, even if they could be with more engineering efforts): It becomes quite useful when you start having to read the additions to your code written by someone else, or rereading your own code half a year down the line when updates are required. explicit static typing also helps with refactoring, which is useful especially when you have to fix or extend your project.
• x3ro 12y ago
  The headline does not match his conclusion at all, in my opinion. What he's trying to say is that "dynamic scripting languages are slower and more error-prone than compiled, statically typed languages". And to determine whether or not a scripting language is ever a good idea from 3 or 4 examples does not seem like a good idea. E.g. Lua seems to be a pretty good fit for the WoW UI scripting stuff and EA used Python (apparently successfully) for their Sims 4 scripting (sorry for it both being examples of games, those were just the first that came to my mind :D)
• untitaker_ 12y ago
  The JVM is not usable for short-living processes such as command-line tools. Apart from the ecosystem and the language itself, it's often the reference (or only) implementation which makes it unsuitable for a particular job.
  • pjmlp 12y ago
    There isn't "The JVM", there are certified JVMs and quite a few of those allow for AOT compilation to native code.
    • Teckla 12y ago
      ...quite a few of those allow for AOT compilation to native code Do you know of any good and free ahead-of-time Java compilers that produce native binaries without any additional dependencies? I haven't been able to find any, but perhaps my Google-fu is weak. gcj is obviously not a good answer.
      • pjmlp 12y ago
        gcj is dead. For good ones I only know of commercial like Aonix, Websphere Real Time, Excelsior JET, JamaicaVM and a few others. If you want to go free and are happy just with GNU/Linux and Mac OS X/iOS, then RoboVM might be an option. If you want to go research, there is Graal/SubstrateVM from Oracle Labs and JikesRVM, a meta-circular JVM.
  • diltonm 12y ago
    I don't understand the argument, I've used it for several small CLI tools, it works great.
• S4M 12y ago
  This post makes me wonder, what about Jython? I don't use it, but it would be a nice fit for the OP (writing performance critical code in Java, and use Jython as a glue). Are there any drawbacks with it?
  • rcarmo 12y ago
    Jython 2.7 isn't quite all there yet, and last I used the betas it wasn't that practical.
• mercurial 12y ago
  "Java for everything, because it's the only statically type language with a fast runtime I know well". Ok, Java is not terrible (PHP is terrible), and the JVM is a marvel of eat-your-RAM engineering, but this makes me sad, because there are only two things that can be said about Java: it's not terrible and it has a big ecosystem. There is nothing brilliant about it. It is slowly crawling toward convenient feature, but it's never going to be at the same level as a well-designed functional language in terms of correctness and readability-to-expressiveness ratio.
• fenesiistvan 12y ago
  Java is perfect also for client side. We have a client app (a complex VoIP softphone) with different codebase for all platforms (C++ for windows, java for android, ObjectC for iOS). Right now we are in the way to reduce all this in one single codebase written in Java and the user interface in html/css/javascript, so the user interface is always running in a webview. -Java for windows desktop (there are pretty installers which automatically download and install the JRE if not present) -Java for MAC and Linux desktop (same as for windows desktop. the same installer tools can generate also Linux and MAC packages) -Java for Android (with a very minor conversion for which we already wrote a converter app) -Java for Web (currently using a java Applet which works perfectly. We plan to use GWT to transform to JavaScript in the future) -Java for iOS (will see) This way we plan to cover 99% of all devices with java only (with some minor transformation for some platforms). What is your opinion on this? I am in the right direction?
  • teacup50 12y ago
    This is horrible, but not because of the Java part — it's the webview that puts your desire for a single UI technology stack ahead of user's desire for a decent UX.
  • pjmlp 12y ago
    On mobile devices the issue is Oracle dropping the ball and leaving to third parties (RoboVM, CodenameOne,...) the work of providing JVM implementations. This on iOS, still no story on Windows Phone, which actually happens to be over iOS on some European countries.
    • fenesiistvan 12y ago
      On Android you already have java :) The big question is iOS for which there is no mature tool yet. hopefully j2objc will be enough. Windows phone ...i think that we will wait to see a higher market share before to dig into it
      • pjmlp 12y ago
        > On Android you already have java :) Java 6! Java 7 is only fully available for 4.4 upwards, and only the language, with cherry updates for the library. Meanwhile one needs to resort to Xtend and Scala, if I want to enjoy a bit of Java 8 on Android, across versions. Or use hacks like retrolambda. On Windows Phone vs iOS, it depends on your target market. On countries like mine (Portugal) you will surely see more WP on the street. Of course, US and others are a different matter.
• tawy3 12y ago
  That's where Go comes in very well in the interviews assuming interviewer also knows or can understand Go. It has short and precise syntax and the code usually doesn't need explanation.
  • frowaway001 12y ago
    It's also not very useful.
• freshflowers 12y ago
  The same argument can be made for any mature language with a solid ecosystem of tools and libraries. Except the part about scalability, that's just BS. It has little to do with language and is all about architecture. Sure, at some point language can help you squeeze every ounce of performance out of the hardware (although my money would not be on Java for that), but that's only in cases where either performance is critical or the scale is so huge that saving on hardware makes a big difference.
  • guard-of-terra 12y ago
    It has a lot to do with language. If your language's runtime has solid threading and reasonably pauseless GC (at several gigabytes heap) you run into much much less problems with scalability. Java people take many things for granted.
  • waps 12y ago
    You forget just how much difference there is between languages. Comparing Python and Java for example, it's easy to find things that take 1-2 cpu cycles in Java (or even 0), that take thousands of cpu cycles in Python (e.g. function calls). http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/python.php http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/python.php I mean, I would agree that 1s versus 1.3 seconds doesn't really matter. But look at those numbers we're talking 40-50 TIMES faster in half the cases. The number I tend to use is that one programmer is worth 10 servers. But this has diminishing returns : the larger the site gets, the more you'll focus on servers. But even for small sites. Python is about double java's productivity, no more. That only helps you for very small programs. So for large sites, python would have to be 40-50 times more productive than java. This is exactly python's weak point, and java's strong point ... And from experience I know. Large python programs are horrendously difficult to change. They're like how large perl programs used to be. Changing a tiny thing in one far removed part of the program affects 10 other places in the program, with absolutely no warning, until the site crashes. And then you put a try-catch in your main loop and AAARGH.
    • TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
      And yet there is a benchmark in that particular set you linked in which Python runs in 3/4 the time. Also, I don't like the CLBG - it removed PyPy and a bunch of other implementations of various languages. I would be intrigued to see the speed of PyPy on that particular set of benchmarks, for instance.
• exabrial 12y ago
  If you're actually using good tools (Something like IntelliJ or Eclipse, and something like Maven or Gradle), and you use sane variable and function names (business oriented instead of tech oriented) verbosity is one of the worst arguments against Java. The verbosity, static typing, etc, of Java contributes information to the "next guy" about developer intent and is incredibly valuable.
  • mlvljr 12y ago
    "You just don't get Rails [Python / ...], ri-ight??" ;)
• lkesteloot 12y ago
  It's not so much that Java is great at everything. It's more like it doesn't suck at anything. Every other language has, somewhere, a deal-breaker for some particular use. I've not found one for Java. And Java's biggest downside, frankly, is that it hasn't attracted fresh young talent in a while, so it doesn't have really hot frameworks and libraries.
  • tokenizerrr 12y ago
    While I do think Java is great I think that's an exaggeration, I'm sure there are quite a few deal-breakers for particular uses. Personally I've opted not to use Java before because it cannot compile to a self contained native binary.
    • tormeh 12y ago
      You will be excited to learn about gcj, then. The Gnu Java compiler compiles to native code, but it's currently not maintained, so newer Java features are out of reach.
      • Teckla 12y ago
        You will be excited to learn about gcj, then. The Gnu Java compiler compiles to native code, but it's currently not maintained, so newer Java features are out of reach. gcj has been abandoned. It was last updated over 5 years ago. It's not clear to me why you would even mention it. I'm a software developer that primarily uses and likes Java, and the lack of a good and free ahead-of-time compiler for Java that produces native binaries is what I miss most in the Java ecosystem.
        • mike_hearn 12y ago
          There's Avian. It can produce standalone, compact ELF files that have no dependencies. It's not an AOT compiler though. The problem with AOT in the Java ecosystem is quite a lot of modern frameworks and the like have ended up relying on the ability to synthesise code at runtime. Android has put a check on that kind of behaviour but it's still there. There's also Excelsior, which is an AOT JVM, but it's for Windows only. I agree that a really good AOT JVM would be very nice. It doesn't necessarily imply better performance however. I remember when GCJ compiled Eclipse for the first time, lots of people were surprised that it didn't magically fix every performance problems. GCJ engineers view was "HotSpot is an excellent compiler and it will take a lot of effort to beat it". When Sun Java became open source therefore, a lot of the incentive to develop GCJ disappeared. It was always primarily a licensing project not a performance project.
• leke 12y ago
  I like how the author made the point about the commenting. I never realised it until I started my work training at a big company. I'm reading my colleague's C# (ASP.NET MVC) code and find it requires no commenting to understand even though I started learning C# pretty much on the job. I then had to laugh when I needed to explain some JavaScript (and jQuery) I wrote to him and exclaimed, "What the hell is this doing!". I had to get back to him a few minutes later on. As for Java and C# on the web. I just wish it was more accessible to smaller companies. 100% of my freelance stuff are using cheap hosting that rarely support anything more than Perl/PHP.
  • gred 12y ago
    > As for Java and C# on the web. I just wish it was more accessible to smaller companies. 100% of my freelance stuff are using cheap hosting that rarely support anything more than Perl/PHP. One year ago I would have agreed with you, but I have since discovered some of the newer PaaS solutions like CloudFoundry / Pivotal CF [1] and OpenShift [2]. I'm using Pivotal CF for my current side project (a public website + web service) and am paying about $7/month. [1] http://www.pivotal.io/platform-as-a-service/pivotal-cf http://www.pivotal.io/platform-as-a-service/pivotal-cf [2] https://www.openshift.com/ https://www.openshift.com/
  • hhandoko 12y ago
    PHP vs ASP.NET hosting prices are close to parity now. Some ASP.NET web hosts offers $10/mo plans (a bit more if you want to use SQL Server). Or go with Azure Websites (Shared), starting from ~$15/mo if you think you need to scale up real soon. The same goes with development costs as well (if you are using a Windows machine already). Visual Studio Community edition is free and has support for extensions (where Express does not). They are great for freelancers. Do note that commercial licensing kicks in for > 5 developers.
• jafaku 12y ago
  Does anyone know a good starting point for learning not just Java, but how to install everything I need? I consider myself the Neo of OOP and a master devops, but every time I tried to use Java I hit a wall of unreadable manuals/guides , software impossible to install/maintain, and mixed opinions among Java devs. Like it can't be used without a dedicated sysadmin.
  • mike_hearn 12y ago
    Well. What do you need? For me I've found I only need a few things to get started. One is the JDK, obviously. Another is Maven. It downloads dependencies for you and is pretty standard (there's also Gradle which some projects use). Finally there is IntelliJ for development. That's about it. Pretty much everything else can be downloaded and installed automatically be Maven or your IDE. For web development, I've found Ninja Framework to be quite nice. The documentation is very good. The biggest problem is that it tends to delegate to lots of other libraries for functionality, and often those libraries have been around a long time and in some semi-standardised state that can be horrifically confusing (e.g. Hibernate). The Java world REALLY likes to take good open source libraries and then copy their interfaces into standards that other products can then implement. This sounds great in theory, and I'm sure some people do benefit from that, but it makes learning this stuff a giant PITA because the documentation for everything always has five versions, four implementations and every annotation or API has two identical versions in different namespaces, only one of which will actually work. Argghhhhh. However if you do make it past this swamp, then the tools themselves are actually rather powerful and performant.
  • allengeorge 12y ago
    That...sounds surprising. Basically you need: 1. An IDE (I highly recommend IntelliJ IDEA) 2. A build and dependency management tool (I prefer Gradle, but Maven is a reasonable choice - though way more verbose) Beyond that point, a lot depends on what you want to do. Some of my preferences (YMMV): * logging: slf4j over logback * json serialization/deserialization: jackson * db access (if you don't need or want ORM): jdbi * db migrations: flyway * REST services: jersey * networking: netty * embeddable http server: jersey * http client: apache-commons http client * metrics: codahale's metrics If you're building a backend webservice I highly recommend looking at Dropwizard, which handles a lot of the boiler plate for you.
• rcarmo 12y ago
  I've mostly embraced the JVM (as opposing to hating it), but I find myself reaching for Clojure a lot more than Java (although I have an Android app that I'm tinkering with). I find that an IDE helps (I use NetBeans for pure Java), but whereas I can hack just about anything in Clojure, Python or Go without much hassle, Java slows me down for some reason - I suspect it's the humungous class hierarchies and the time required to find whatever I need to accomplish simple tasks.
  • Xorlev 12y ago
    Once you get used to working in Java (and have a relatively stable toolchain you can depend on), it's realistic to develop applications in Java almost as quickly as Clojure, though complex aggregations that Clojure makes one-liners will often be vastly slower to develop. IntelliJ makes a lot of things easier as well. When it comes to Java, you just need to really get familiar with your tools before you can be as productive, but once you are you can move quickly. Using Java 8 doesn't hurt either, streams are pretty decent.
    • spullara 12y ago
      In Java 8, those one liner aggregations are now possible and part of the standard library.
      • Xorlev 12y ago
        I love Java 8 streams, but they're still awkward compared to Clojure.
• jim_greco 12y ago
  The biggest thing for me is that the tooling around Java makes maintaining large projects extremely easy. Being able to refactor hundreds of files in a few keystrokes without worry lets me sleep well at night. It's certainly a lot faster to get up and running with a dynamic language, but the initial build out is a small percentage of the overall time you are going to spend with a codebase. I've also built just about everything in Java from HFT algos, to an exchange, to a web server, to thick clients so I have an idea in my mind about how to solve any new problem that comes up.
  • pimlottc 12y ago
    I think this is the key point in the debate - weighing initial development time against ongoing development and maintenance. It's something that's hard to grasp until you've been around for a while working on real-world large-scale projects. And it's a hard thing to get the sense of when you're in school, writing throwaway code that doesn't last past the end of the semester. When you understand this, then you can make an honest assessment - is it really important to get the first build out that much quicker? Sometimes it is. But I think it's overemphasized. The first one to market doesn't always win. And the shift from new development to maintenance happens quicker than you might think.
    • hvidgaard 12y ago
      First to market has never ever been about using a dynamically typed language. Getting the ideas from talk to concepts, testing, bugfixing and marketing takes vastly more time than actually developing the code. So while Python might enable me to show my prototype on Monday, while that Java version wouldn't be seen until Friday, there still is quite a lot of time before you can say it's properly released. Where these "fast" to develop languages shines are throwaway prototypes. For some people their ideas flow out much faster with dynamically typed language. But it is all too well known that even though the manager said you could throw it away, they change their mind because "it's basically finished, right?". That said, you are spot on. Initial development is likely not where you want to focus at all, for any kind of project that needs to be maintained for more than a few months.
• jpiabrantes 12y ago
  It's easy to make python faster, you have PyPy, you can even program everything in python and then make a simple C code for the bottleneck and wrap it with python. Php it's another example, Facebook uses php and it made changes to its compiler in order to make it way faster. So bottom line, if people feel better writing in Python let's write Python and improve it to make it faster.
• otikik 12y ago
  ...For a very personal definition of "Everything".
• larrys 12y ago
  Having literally deciding to learn java last week for no particular purpose other than having enough understanding to be able to comprehend our software (which is written primarily in java) and prevent brain deterioration, I'm encouraged by the fact that the comments in this thread (so far) don't appear to be very negative (like when reading about php). While I did buy a book, I wonder if anyone has any suggestions on a good java beginner's book assuming someone has "prosumer" programming knowledge (shell programming, some perl, some php, sysadmin skills and so on). Suggestions?
  • scalesolved 12y ago
    Welcome to the Java world! Like some of the comments so far I think the Java world is actually a pretty cool place to be right now, the language and approaches are becoming a lot less verbose. I blogged about some of the best Java books, hope it'll help you out! http://scalabilitysolved.com/dont-hold-back-your-java/ http://scalabilitysolved.com/dont-hold-back-your-java/
    • larrys 12y ago
      Thanks for that. Question though. The first book you listed (which got excellent amazon reviews as well) was published in 2008. Typically I've been biased into thinking that a book had to be somewhat recent. Obviously this isn't the case here though. (Do you agree with that in some situations btw?). I would have never purchased this book if you hadn't pointed it out so thanks it's in my cart.
      • allengeorge 12y ago
        Effective Java is a solid choice, and a lot of the advice is still relevant six years later :) Also, JCIP is a go-to if you want to get more than a passing handle on concurrency in Java.
        • scalesolved 12y ago
          Agreed, the java books I listed still provide more value to my core Java than more recent books. I do the majority of my Java work now in the Play framework, when I use a new framework or library blogs and stackoverflow are my go to resources, for a deeper understanding of the library then those books are the way forward.
• zwetan 12y ago
  I completely buy the idea "write everything in one language", even if I do it with a different language for completely different reasons. In general I think "use the best tool/language for the job" and anyway any tool/language will have pros and cons, nothing is perfect. My context is I was a big ECMAScript fan, then I moved to use something called ActionScript 3.0 and there I just found the "right balance" between verbosity, correctness, speed, etc. That's the work part, I use AS3 and AIR to build mobile app for iOS/Android. Then there is the hobby part, in 2006 Adobe open sourced their ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2), I started to work on it (OSS project RedTamarin) in 2008 because I had this silly idea "it would be fun to run AS3 on the command line". So, few months ago, with a not too bad release of this RedTamarin project, in the spirit of "use your own dog food" and trying to push the limit of what can be done with this open source project, I kind of decided to use only AS3 for all development, either work or home. I don't do that because I think it is better or faster, but mainly to see how much I can reuse in code and logic, and if ultimately it make things easier for me (as any dev I'm lazy). The result is quite interesting, so far I can run AS3 in shell scripts, as server side CGI, as command line tool, and tons of different use case I would have not necessarily explored if I didn't forced myself to use the same language for everything. My point here is the same way you can learn a different programming language every few months/years to learn new stuff, there is also a value of forcing yourself to use only one programming language for everything. In my case it forced me to explore some context deeper instead of taking them for granted, sure some ppl could say you waste your time because you're reinventing the wheel, but I would argue you learn a lot more when you try to know all the little details that make a wheel works :).
  • aikah 12y ago
    interesting,I need to check it out,you should add a link to the project. I definetly like AS3,it's a good compromise between javascript and java.
    • zwetan 12y ago
      here you go http://www.redtamarin.com/ http://www.redtamarin.com/ and the g+ community https://plus.google.com/communities/111596731002136630496 https://plus.google.com/communities/111596731002136630496 and yeah it's kind of why I'm doing that, AS3 is for me a good balance as a side note, the way redtamarin is implemented you have access to almost all POSIX C functions from AS3 which can also be seen as a "Friendly Dialect of C"
• Osmose 12y ago
  A significant amount of the article is arguing that Java for everything is better because the author and his coworkers already knows it. I can make the same argument for Python _for me_. And for my company too; we have a ton of Python developers already, so it makes sense to write things in Python if possible in case someone needs to change or improve anything. The author also talks about how Java's verbosity is a trivial issue, and in terms of "stuff you have to type", I agree. The point isn't to save a few characters to type. To me, the problem with Java's verbosity is that it _impedes understanding_. The excessive notation required by type declarations and generics and so on are visual noise that distract from what the code is doing. There are some valid points raised too, such as concerns about Python's scalability, but that's an argument for _choosing the right tool for the right job_, which, while mocked at the beginning of the post as a way to avoid an interview question, is still good advice. For a lot of projects, Python is fast enough to handle the expected processing, has an ecosystem with libraries that handle all of the things the project might need to do, and is portable enough to run on the platforms necessary. For some projects, it fails one of these, and another language may be a better choice. That's okay! I think the best takeaway here is that it is sometimes useful to see if you can leverage your existing knowledge in one programming language by applying it to a task you don't normally use it for. By all means, write shell scripts in Java, maybe that's really useful! Or maybe write a GUI in Haskell! Transpile BASIC to frontend code! (For context, I use Python for web development (both small and large sites), scripting, and a few personal projects like a music player or emulator. I did a bunch of Java in college and some internships.)
  • edwinnathaniel 12y ago
    Though the lack of noise could also translate to parsing things in my head trying to understand what is happening in this super short code....hence it takes longer to read the code!
    • lmm 12y ago
      Maybe, but what are the examples? "Foo f = new Foo()" takes longer to read than "f = new Foo()". An anonymous class is longer than a lambda and also less readable, as Java folk have thankfully finally realized. "public static void main" does not clarify anything. Getters and setters are the bane of my Java-reading life, because 99.9% of them are the exact same autogenerated four lines, but you still have to read them all in case one of them is different. Also, there's a huge jump in readability at the point where a method or class fits on a single screen. So if 4 lines of Java = 1 line of Brand X, but it takes me the same amount of time to read 4 lines of Java or 1 line of Brand X - that's still a win for Brand X, because it's much easier to write classes that fit on a single screen.
• msluyter 12y ago
  There's the language and there's the ecosystem. A lot of negative feelings that still linger are, IMHO, directed more at some of the painful historical aspects of the ecosystem: J2EE XML configuration hell, EJBs, bloated application servers, XML for everything, JAX-WS, SOAP, ant, classloader problems, maven dependency hell, 10 different logging libraries, etc... A lot of this stuff truly sucked. But I feel things have improved over time. Dropwizard, gradle, embedded jetty, jersey, guava, Spring boot, etc... The trend is towards minimizing configuration and overall, the ecosystem has become somewhat more manageable. I wouldn't necessarily call it pleasant, but it's better. An as for the language itself, Java8's lambdas + streams provide significant improvements. Compare this (Java 7): public static List<Integer> sortDescending(List<Integer> ints) { ints.sort(new Comparator<Integer>() { @Override public int compare(Integer o1, Integer o2) { return o1.equals(o2) ? 0 : o1 < o2 ? 1 : -1; } }); return ints; } to this (Java 8): public static List<Integer> sortDescending2(List<Integer> ints) { ints.sort((o1, o2) -> o1.equals(o2) ? 0 : o1 < o2 ? 1 : -1); return ints; } (Example is contrived, since you could use the built in Collections.reverse() to achieve the same result. My main point is that we have eliminated ~4 lines (counting braces) of ceremony.) All that said, I'd rather be using Clojure.
  • blazespin 12y ago
    I suspect readability isn't a big priority for you. Here's how I'd write this, lambdas or not: public static List<Integer> sortDescending(List<Integer> ints) { ints.sort(new Comparator<Integer>() { @Override public int compare(Integer o1, Integer o2) { if (o1.equals(o2)) { return 0; } else if (o1 < o2) { return 1; } else { return -1; } } }); return ints; } My personal perspective is that your use is a typical abuse which turns simple code into something unreadable and overly complex. This makes code hard to maintain and buggy. Not to mention, it's nigh impossible to step through in a debugger..
    • msluyter 12y ago
      shrug. This seems like a pretty standard use of the ternary operator to me. I mean, just google examples of Comparator, and you'll find tons of examples like this: @Override public int compareTo(Object arg0) { Country country=(Country) arg0; return (this.countryId < country.countryId ) ? -1: (this.countryId > country.countryId ) ? 1:0 ; } (http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2013/03/difference-between-comparator-and-comparable-in-java.html http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2013/03/difference-between-comp...) But that's orthogonal to my point, which is that lambdas offer significant improvements to readability because they remove the irrelevant cruft and simplify the code.
• lmm 12y ago
  Verbosity matters for reading and maintenance far more than it does for writing. IDEs can make the writing faster, but they can't make the code as easy to comprehend as it would be in a more expressive language. And remember that lines of code is the only proven risk factor for bugs. Most sites are not Twitter. They're not Stack Overflow. They're not even Nanowrimo. I've watched a company spend two years, dozens of developers, and over a million in ESB license fees failing to write a site that was expected to have, at peak, 100 users/day. Their competitor had four guys writing Ruby, and was profitable after the first month. Nor are the performance advantages "permanent"; even if you use Java, you will probably have to rewrite if you reach Twitter scale, because your initial app won't be clusterable (or if it is, it's massively overengineered and your business will fail). So do it the way twitter succeeded - write the first version in Ruby, and then worry about performance when you need to. The advantage of using the same language on both sides of a boundary are real but overstated. If you have a system with multiple components, you probably need to evolve the interfaces between them, and you need to be able to upgrade without downtime. Which means you need well-defined interfaces for which you understand the compatibility implications - in other words, you need something like Thrift. I've used Thrift even for Java-Java interfaces, but once you're using something like that it doesn't matter which language is on the other side. Still, the library point is valid, as is the point about spending time with a language. Better to have one language that you know very well than ten in which you dabble. But by the same token it's worth taking the time to make sure that language is the very best available. I use Scala for everything, and there's plenty to learn - maybe even twice as much as a "normal" language. But if I'm focusing on that one language, I can afford to take the time to learn it really well. And Scala combines the expressiveness, clarity and scripting-suitability of Python (yes, it can be unclear if you use silly method names or libraries that use silly method names - don't do that then) with the strong type-safety and performance of Java. It's a great language in any case, but especially if you want a single language for everything, I don't think anything else comes close.
  • edwinnathaniel 12y ago
    Care to share more details of these companies including how the Ruby ones become profitable after a month with 4 guys on payroll? No offense but I've got to check the facts these days.. :). Also, don't forget Fred Brooks article about the Second System. I betcha smart engineers on tight budget can hack in Java just as quick as those 4 guys and achieve the same result. My apology, Java today is as productive as Ruby on Rails. The difference between rewriting a Rails site to Java and an already written system un Java to a more modern architecture is huge. One can slowly move from old Java architecture to the newer one but it'll be trickier from Rails to something else... don't forget the accumulated Ops experience managing jvm based app server, the devil in details for those experienced engineers who have been there and done that...
• chadrs 12y ago
  This whole "expressive vs. performance" is a false dichotomy. Languages like Scala and Haskell are performant like Java and expressive like Python. Not to mention the work being done on JIT compilers by V8/HHVM/PyPy that are helping to close the performance gap for dynamic languages.
  • BenoitP 12y ago
    I am maintaining at the moment some Scala code I did not write. Sometimes you wish for less expresiveness.
    • swah 12y ago
      A couple years ago there were several people complaining that is was a write-only language. (Of course, others said that it was a matter of educating your devs about when not to use some features...) When I first tried it, the slow compilation killed it for me (not a problem for Clojure because a connected Emacs makes for a killer setup...)
  • nickbauman 12y ago
    Clojure too. Very fast. Very readable. Very expressive.
• ks 12y ago
  > Map<String,User> userIdMap = new HashMap<String,User>(); 1.7 introduced a simplified version: Map<String,User> userIdMap = new HashMap<>();
  • justinsb 12y ago
    And Guava has Map<String,User> userIdMap = Maps.newHashMap() which uses Java's type inference rules, and works in 1.6 (I think even in 1.5)
• ridiculous_fish 12y ago
  You have to appreciate bombastic statements like this for forcing you to confront your assumptions. "Everything in Java? Even a kernel? That's absurd." you think, and then wonder what makes it absurd, and realize that it could perhaps be done with some modifications, and remember Singularity, etc. But on the other hand, this is well trod ground. Everything WAS going to be Java. Remember picoJava, the bytecode-native processor? Remember Cocoa Java, for OS X desktop apps? Remember HotJava, the pure Java web browser? These things were tried, and they failed. Performance issues, especially around startup and memory usage. The weightiness of the JVM, what Jobs called a "big ball and chain." The weird foreignness of Swing apps. The generalized misery of applets. Etc. So honest question: what's different this time?
  • teacup50 12y ago
    > So honest question: what's different this time? We've rediscovered ahead-of-time compilation.
  • davelnewton 12y ago
    You forgot JavaOS.
  • marktangotango 12y ago
    Great perspective! I don't think 're-implement the world in java' was the point of the blog post. I do follow you're line of thought however. Vala is a Java like language (in the same way C# has a subset that is Java like) that is AOT compiled by translating to C. Interestingly, it has a few departures that make it very un Java like. For example, Vala uses reference counting for memory management and provides a 'weak' keyword, passing reference cycle management off to the programmer. And voila, no gc (edit: or rather no centuries level of effort garbage collector implementation, with associated performance indeterminism). Another departure is no dynamic class loading. Point: I use Vala as a proof by example there's a language out there that's statically typed, highly productive, GC'd, and AOT friendly, for which some formulation of "X Everywhere" is not far fetched.
• zmmmmm 12y ago
  I think that the argument about verbosity is a subtle red herring. It's not that you just have to write slightly longer words to do the same thing. It's that you can't do the same thing at all because the underlying constructs of the language are lacking in key powers of abstraction that make it easy to simplify the problem you are trying to solve. You end up inventing whole class hierarchies and patterns to emulate things that are either just built into other languages or are easy to achieve because they offer more powerful language features (like reified generics, etc.). Java 8 helps a lot, but there are still fundamental weaknesses. Having said that, I'm still a fan of Java. There's no other language that I can sit down and reliably navigate through someone else's code in as easily - and that comes partly because it's powers of abstraction are so limited.
• grannyg00se 12y ago
  "With few exceptions (such as parsers), unit tests are a waste of time." I was in full agreement aside from this. Unit tests are more than just a substitute for static typing.
  • jtheory 12y ago
    That surprised me as well; though perhaps it's just that "such as parsers" applies to more code than the author realized. A parser is a discrete chunk of code that's general-purpose (likely to be called from lots of places with different content), but with a fairly straightforward list of cases that you can/should test to see how correct and robust it is. There's a lot of code that fits into this category; not just parsers.
• facepalm 12y ago
  How do you even parse JSON in Java? I remember in the days of XML, there was a kind of specification standard for the xml (a specification for how to specify a specification?). From that you could generate Java classes that would correspond to the elements of the XML. But for JSON there is no such meta description, so you are stuck with manually parsing the JSON and hoping you catch all nuances?
  • jim_greco 12y ago
    There's plenty of libraries for this. Jackson being the best one I've used.
  • cgh 12y ago
    Have a look at the Jackson library. There are many others.
  • larsmak 12y ago
    Typically you create your class manually and map to-and-from json-strings. In a web-context you'd usually let the container handle the serialization/de-serialization (jax-rs), in other contexts I tend to use Google's GSON-library.
  • justinsb 12y ago
    I'd recommend Google Gson; it works either with model classes, or with a generic JsonObject. Jackson is good, and more powerful in terms of model mapping, but I find it much more complicated to work with.
  • diltonm 12y ago
    Google's GSON is the one I've turned to on several projects.
• nickbauman 12y ago
  In real-world benchmarks in a real app I have tried to make Clojure slower than Java. I can't. In rare cases Java will beat it in insignificant ways in insignificant amounts, but I found that Clojure sometimes beats it in significant ways because of the runtime's tendency toward laziness. Furthermore, Clojure is a very dynamic language that can leverage every library Java has plus all its own. As a result I will not program in Java willingly. There's just no reason to do it. Not with at least one language that's far better in real, quantifiable ways. There are other languages that run on the JVM that could tell a similar story. Unfortunately those are not Jython or JRuby.
  • swah 12y ago
    Its hard to explain, but I feel like Java would be a better choice for doing something like audio decoding, while Clojure is orders of magnitude more productive to prototype a webapp.
• linuxhansl 12y ago
  Committer to Apache HBase here: I agree with the author on some level. All of HBase and Hadoop (except for a little bit of native stuff) is implemented in Java. I found that to be + and a -. Java is easy to understand and to follow, lends itself very well to large-team development, and performs well in most situations. The alleged verbosity I do not mind. I have tools, and well structured code is easy to follow. Java (or the JVM really) does have limits, though. What I miss by far the most are simple pointers and access to the RAM outside of the Java heap. Then again I am working on a low-latency database. Yes there are DirectByteBuffers but they are annoying to use, just gimme a struct (some IBM folks are working on a proposal for that for Java). Everybody in this space who is using Java invents their own off-heap code to avoid heap allocations and the inevitable garbage collections. G1 will make it better, but not eliminate this. I still user other tools: Python, Ruby, Bash (yes), JavaScript, C/C++, etc, and I disagree with the author's premise. It depends very much on what I attempt to do which language/ecosystem I will use for that. Edit I: In the end I prefer to versatility of Java over the limits I face with it. Would I write a Kernel in Java: No. At least not with the current JVM. Edit II: We should not conflate Java with the JVM.
  • pjmlp 12y ago
    I guess you aren't aware of http://openjdk.java.net/projects/panama/ http://openjdk.java.net/projects/panama/ http://openjdk.java.net/projects/valhalla/ http://openjdk.java.net/projects/valhalla/ http://openjdk.java.net/projects/sumatra/ http://openjdk.java.net/projects/sumatra/ Some of the features will come in Java 9, others in Java 10.
• swah 12y ago
  Do Java/JVM folks miss the simple deployment of Go? I haven't used Java for a while (used Jetty to deploy), but words like "application servers" are the things that make Java sound "heavy".
  • ecopoesis 12y ago
    I think most people are using embedded Jetty or Netty (or even Tomcat in embedded mode) so deployment is just a jar that can be run with any old JRE.
• mataug 12y ago
  I've been writing Python and Java(Android) side by side for a few months. I feel that for all the advantages of initial speed that python offers it takes a lot away. Especially in large projects. I spend a significant amount of my python time trying to understand Types, and if those areas are not covered by tests then I'm Fked, I'll have to spend hours trying simulate the exact conditions of how an error occurred. Don't get me wrong, I love python, but writing python requires a lot of restraint and experience. Novice programmers who build a python code base just screw things up, especially those who don't yet understand the value of readability and maintainability. I'd much prefer novice code on Java than on Python.
• jimbokun 12y ago
  Ok, now your boss asks you to write an iPhone client. Or web client with a lot of logic in the browser. Or even a custom, native windows client. (Ok, Swing or SWT, but, ...really?) "Language X for Everything" is simple not possible, regardless of the value for X.
  • hhandoko 12y ago
    * C# (and/or F#) to build iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone apps [1] * F# code that compiles to JavaScript for front-ends [2] * C# (and/or F#) code for Windows and *nix clients [3] They are not perfect (nor the tooling are free), but it is possible. [1] - http://xamarin.com/ http://xamarin.com/ [2] - http://websharper.com/ http://websharper.com/ [3] - http://www.mono-project.com/ http://www.mono-project.com/
    • zamalek 12y ago
      There is also a project that can convert MSIL to Javascript. So, add to that list * C# code that compiles to Javascript for front-ends [1] Or, indeed, any .Net-targetted language like Nemerle, Boo and <gasp> VB. [1]: http://jsil.org/ http://jsil.org/
• yawboakye 12y ago
  The article could be appropriately titled to reflect this wisdom: solve every problem in whichever language is your strong suit. It's not always Java, and arguing that Java is the one-size-fits-all would earn you few friends. For web services the importance of the language is diminishing with solutions such as cache, messaging queue, etc. I'd go on a limb to say getting your cache right is the most important web service optimization. All statements of the form "it's relatively faster to write programs in language Y than language Z" are incorrect because it disregards important parameters such as programmer experience with languages Y and Z, and whether or not it's a comparison between 2 different programmers. Also there are some performance gains that only pay off at Twitter or Facebook scale [1]. Sometimes shaving milliseconds costs time but rakes in little to no benefits. [1]: http://carlos.bueno.org/optimization/ http://carlos.bueno.org/optimization/
• overgard 12y ago
  You know, one of the things I notice about Java adherents: they think programming is hard. There's this weird conservativeness to their culture. The only times I've worked on Java teams, I felt like the biggest hurdle was convincing people that things could actually be done. Its like they're convinced that every programmer sucks. I don't even hate java the language. It's far too mediocre to even bother to hate. I just dislike java the community. It's so depressing.
• fleitz 12y ago
  LOL, I spend all day next to java programmers trying to get GUIs to work in a performant manner. Just pickup any Android device and you can see the lag, ever wonder why all the java phones have 4 GB of memory and a quad core processor just to draw a 1920x1080 screen?
• applecore 12y ago
  > You can complain all day about public static void main, but have fun setting up 500 servers. The downsides of dynamic languages are real, expensive, and permanent. Love this quote. This is a thought-provoking article, even if you don't agree with everything as stated.
  • Turing_Machine 12y ago
    500.times {ec2.instances.create(:image_id => "ami-foobar")} Or if you want to own the hardware, you can do the equivalent with a Chef script, or a Puppet script, or.. No one is going to set up 500 servers by hand.
    • Turing_Machine 12y ago
      The point being that you can start 500 servers with a trivial amount of effort, rather than it being some kind of major undertaking as the author pretends. This is 2014, guys. You don't have to unbox and plug in all the HDs yourself. If they're (e.g.) ec2 microinstances, 500 servers would cost you about $6,000/month, which is comparable to the monthly cost of just one extra programmer (maybe much less, if you're in a high wage location and you add in all the benefits, etc.) And remember, that's assuming you're operating at reddit scale, which, to be blunt, you're not likely to be doing. The article is full of similar handwaving (e.g, "it's only 3 extra characters" when most class names are far longer than 3 characters, and you also have to multiply that extra typing by the number of lines in your codebase). I'm glad Java works for him. Me, I abandoned it around the year 2000 and have never looked back.
• songco 12y ago
  It's a great idea to make java run like a script...
• ionelm 12y ago
  The argument can be made both ways. One can say that Python is better cause readability. Many can give examples of successful or failed projects in both languages but it's just conjecture. The only correct way to look at language choice, and the only objective one, is to use the language you are productive in. The best language is the one you master.
• binsch 12y ago
  You can get IDE features in vim: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Use_Vim_like_an_IDE http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Use_Vim_like_an_IDE
• diltonm 12y ago
  >> Whatever time was saved by the developer when writing the Python code (if any) were lost many times over as dozens of users had to wait ten times longer each time they fished through the logs. I was first exposed to Python in 2002. The sentiment in the quote above is reminiscent of the reasons I came back to Java. With a little Bash and some Java or a little Python and some Java I can do pretty much anything I need from system services to web to rich clients. Edit: Great article.
• choicenotchance 12y ago
  I would say that making something fast and effectively in Python (or such languages), and then scaling their apps by rewriting them (or the core) in Java/C++, is the way to go. Nobody should be preemptively think of Python as a bad language for enterprise apps. That's the gist that I'm getting from this article. That is total baloney. We have written enterprise apps in Django for a lot of clients, and all of them are working just fine. Not all of them get the traffic that twitter gets, but even scaling in Python is possible, and although it may require many more servers and top notch optimizations, it's still better to have it up and running from idea to app in about 2-3 months rather than spending about a 8-12 months doing it in Java. BTW, if I were to switch to Java for projects that have the potential to grow to Twitter's scale, what's the most Django like framework in it?
• abalone 12y ago
  iOS got this far on Objective-C. Seems like nobody really complains about that one the way they complain about Java. I think he goes a bit too far with "unit tests are a waste of time" (maybe he just means for type checking). But other than that this perfect captures my very pragmatic view towards Java. There's a lot to be said for consolidating on one server language, and if you're going to pick one language, that's the one.
  • peatmoss 12y ago
    The Obj-C stuff always had a very low cost to bring in C stuff. I've not done a lot with Java's FFI in terms of writing code, but every time I've tried to manage a build with Java that uses external C libraries, I want to cry. That alone pretty much erases the differences in hassle between Java and Obj-C in my opinion.
• frozenport 12y ago
  Not until they support more than 2^31 elements in my array!
• smegel 12y ago
  I maintain and develop a large code base written in (mainly) Python with some C thrown in here and there. It was maintained and developed by a number of people before me over several years, who have come and gone. And yes while there is rust and cobwebs, I don't attribute any maintenance issues to the fact it is Python or a dynamic language, but rather higher level design decisions about interfaces and boundaries and responsibilities. Often some module that wasn't supposed to know something all of a sudden needs to know due to some new/changed requirement, and redrawing data flows and structures to ensure the right information is where it needs to be can be challenging. But this situation can be applicable to a system developed in any language - if anything Python's flexible data structures makes it easy to accomplish such re-engineering. The last time I tried to do anything in Java, I was instructed to "just run the maven build script". After watching that flaming train wreck I walked away and haven't looked back since.
• BuckRogers 12y ago
  The problem with 'use the best tool for the job' is that everyone's 'best tool' is selected from a relatively small pool. The choices for some use-cases have a multitude of similarly worthy choices. Thus, not likely really the best available. Just another subjective choice. That said, I don't understand the obsession with 1 language to rule them all that the Java and Javascript crowd seem to share. I do understand having 1 go-to that you reach for to build projects. Something broadly applicable like Java, C# or Python. But shell scripting in Java? Seems a bit extreme, I'd never bother. You can pull out a Python/Powershell script that does whatever you're trying to do and do it much easier and faster. There's a reason Windows has C#/Powershell, and Linux has (as an example) Java/Python.
• austinz 12y ago
  First of all, I want to say that if you like Java, and know it well, and believe it to be the right tool for your particular application, that you should absolutely use it. > That Java is the right language for all jobs. (Emphasis his.) > The advantages of C and C++ [...] don’t apply to my work. So, choose the right tool for the right job. As for the examples given: > At one company I wrote a simulator that allowed me to run my Java services without a fully-functional site. (The unit under test is Java, so it makes sense to write the simulator in Java, rather than Javascript) > My partner Dan Collens suggested Java [for a log parser], since it’s right there and we know it and it’s fast. (The log parser is used so often that the amortized opportunity cost of developing in Java is more than paid off by faster processing, therefore Java is the right tool for the job) > And finally, I went to write a simple program that put up a web interface. (This is something the author has done many times before and knows how to do well in Java, and his primary goal is getting it running ASAP, therefore Java is the right tool for the job) I still think you should choose the right tool for the right job. It just happens that the author's work is constrained in such a way that Java turns out to be the right tool in most, if not all cases. Honestly, though, I would rather choose the same tool for a job each time by deciding that it's, by merit and virtue, the best tool for the job, rather than relying upon the author's silly heuristic.
  • banachtarski 12y ago
    This is the correct response to this article. He makes a big deal out of saying he doesn't need to "choose the right tool" anymore. But then later, he feels compelled to qualify that Java is the right tool for him, which sort of invalidates his former point. In other words, I viewed this article as a large waste of time. Nothing has been added to what is already conventional wisdom.
• V-2 12y ago
  "No, actually, typing Foo one extra time does not “really suck”. It’s three letters" Hah, if only it was always just three letters... :)) Usually more, and it's called NOISE. That's why C# has "var" and C++11 has "auto" (with all the benefits of strong typing still in place, obviously) "And other languages like D and Go are too new to bet my work on." I'd argue that D isn't really that knew, only niche. It's been around for over 10 years now.
• hunnypot 12y ago
  "HAS-KELL! HAS-KELL!"
• divs1210 12y ago
  This post relies on the assumption that all dynamic languages are an order of magnitude slower than java. Not very long ago, the OP would have used the same argument in favor of C++, and against java. In fact- many dynamic languages have proven To perform better than traditional ones in some areas, such as javascript on node for web-dev. Clojure, for example is WAY faster than python. Incremental typing can squeeze out some additional power as well.
• 0800899g 12y ago
  Great not to see a another java bashing post on HN
• davelnewton 12y ago
  No no, not Java for everything. I know Java, use Java, and don't hate it. Some of the best tooling available (similarly C#, but .NET isn't my thing.) Here's my issue: no matter what problem you try to solve the solution looks like Java. I want my solutions to look like my problem. Static imports go part of the way there, and if you're good at naming and architecture, the learning curve for any particular system remains relatively low. It's a hack/sugar, but it helps. But that's about as far as you can go using only stock Java, e.g., no syntax extenders, no byte code treachery, etc. AOP can help, but everyone has to be aware of it, and comfortable with a system designed with AOP from the beginning. Java for shell scripts? No thanks.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• evanx 12y ago
  I'm thinking "Node.js for everything." It's way more fun, more productive, and runs small and fast. Forget threads. I too used to believe "Java for Everything." Over it. Write microservices in Node. Build front-ends in Angular. Talk JSON.
• assertnotnull 12y ago
  Sooo.. Why Paypal switched from Java to Node then? http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/software-as-a-service/paypal-finds-nodejs-secret-to-successful-makeover/d/d-id/1127734 http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/software-as-a-service/p... BTW. I work with Java & GWT and I find it overkill for our needs. It took 5 months to make a 4 views, each with image or video grids and upload button. On the side. I have on my free time working with Django and have a website with Authentification, comments, categories... In the end, my personal project has more features.. less lines. Instragram uses Django and so is Disqus. Are those slow?
  • emilburzo 12y ago
    > BTW. I work with Java & GWT and I find it overkill for our needs. It took 5 months to make a 4 views, each with image or video grids and upload button. I work with the same stack and don't understand what could have taken so much? Or did you include time spent reading the docs?
• koffiezet 12y ago
  Everything in Java? Thanks but no thanks. I understand the author's point, but he's choosing the wrong language. Does the perfect language for this purpose exist? No - sorry. I've been charmed by Go lately and replacing python, small C/C++ and shell-scripts with small tools written in it. It has great potential for services and small tools and has a surprisingly large amount of libraries available for it given the language's age. But would I say Go is perfect for everything? Hell no - but it happens to be pretty good for what I need. My view of Java may be a bit biased, since I also tend to look at things from the sysadmin pov nowadays. I can only tell that I never disliked Java until I had to take care of the monstrosities the Java developers bring to life, and mind you - I started out as a Java dev back in 2000. The main issue I have with Java is the JVM and memory usage and leaks. No matter what people claim - no memory leaks in Java is a fairy-tale. We run both custom C++ and Java services (about 50/50) on a few hundred servers - and I cannot find a single issue in our ticketing system related to memory problems with any of our C++ services. Java services? Every. Single. Week. When I get an alert some JBoss unexpectedly died or became unresponsive - "java.lang.OutOfMemoryError" is most likely going to be the problem. A lot of those are permgen space errors, and yes you can try all the "fixes" like increasing the permgenspace, permgensweeping, enabling class unloading, ... but these don't always fix the problem and slow down your services. Every time this happened in our own services, this had to be fixed by our developers. It takes weeks to locate the problem, and you end up deploying new versions, upgrading JBoss, JSF, Bouncycastle, ... whatever.
  • sandGorgon 12y ago
    can you talk about your jboss configuration ? We are thinking of building our API stack in java and are considering wildfly (undertow). Honestly, you are the first person who has talked about problems in Jboss and would appreciate some more info.
    • koffiezet 12y ago
      The problems aren't really JBoss related. I have very little problems with Wildfly itself. It is a clear improvement over previous versions, I had some problems with v7 which required me to upgrade the JSF modules, otherwise JBoss would suddenly die (in a crash & burn way) with a certain application we had. It's mostly the "memory is not an issue" attitude most java devs have. It's not JBoss specific, we also have some services written in pure Java suffering the same problems - but the majority of the Java apps run in JBoss here. Stress tests in test/qa usually don't bring up the issues I've seen, which sometimes only occur after weeks of running flawlessly with production-grade loads. The 'fix' is then running the critical apps twice behind a load balancer, waiting for one of the 2 instances to die (for logs/memory dumps), automatically restarting them - and hoping they won't go down simultaneously. Truth is - memory management in Java is HARD. When problems pop up, apparently finding the source of it is very difficult. I can't count the times I've heard "we think it should be fixed now", only to be confronted with another alert that the service died again a few weeks later. If it was one service we'd run, it would be fine, but we run quite a few more - resulting in weekly interruptions, tickets, sending of memory dumps to developers, convincing them - again - that it is their problem and not mine, ... So well - I'm sick and tired of Java. The only thing worse to deploy and manage are Ruby apps. But that's a personal opinion.
• zoobert 12y ago
  I read and liked your post. I like you love python but have to deal daily with Java at work and have the same kind of thinking. With the age, I guess that what matters is the result and not with what it has been built. Of course I like experimenting with new technologies but I have abandoned to spend energy and time in church battles because in the end you realize that you can very often answer a problem with your usual tools in computer science at the moment. Anyway I liked your java_launcher trick and would like to benefit from it if it is freely available of course. However I could not find it in the teamten repository ? Thanks for letting me know.